Complete stories

Review by New York Times Review

GRANT, by Ron Chernow. (Penguin Press, $40.) Chernow gives us a Grant for our time, comprehensively recounting not only the victorious Civil War general but also a president who fought against white supremacy groups like the Ku Klux Klan and championed the right of eligible citizens to exercise the vote. GOOD ME BAD ME, by Ali Land. (Flatiron, $25.99.) This debut novel's teenage narrator is speaking to the mother she loves and misses. It's a one-sided conversation because her mother is about to go on trial for murder, and her daughter is the one who turned her in. THE RIVIERA SET: Glitz, Glamour, and the Hidden World of High Society, by Mary S. Lovell. (Pegasus, $27.95.) Full of gossip about what Somerset Maugham called a "sunny place for shady people," Lovell's narrative describes the entertainments staged by the various owners of a chateau in the south of France. THE ORDINARY VIRTUES: Moral Order in a Divided World, by Michael Ignatieff. (Harvard, $27.95.) This admirable little book, in which the author grapples with whether globalization is drawing us together or tearing us apart, represents a triumph of execution over conception. FRESH COMPLAINT: Stories, by Jeffrey Eugenides. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) In his debut collection, written over three decades, Eugenides explores variations on the theme of failure - marital, creative and financial - while at times reprising characters from his novels "Middlesex" and "The Marriage Plot." WHY WE SLEEP: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, by Matthew Walker. (Scribner, $27.) The director of Berkeley's Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab makes the argument for why sleep is essential to our well-being: "to reset our brain and body health each day." GREATER GOTHAM: A History of New York City From 1898 to 1919, by Mike Wallace. (Oxford, $45.) A vibrant, detailed chronicle, almost 1,200 pages long, of the 20 years that made New York City the place we know today, with new bridges, the advent of Broadway and the opening of the first subway lines. COMPLETE STORIES, by Kurt Vonnegut. Edited by Jerome Klimkowitz and Dan Wakefield. (Seven Stories, $45.) Vonnegut used his early short fiction to test the themes that animated his later novels. For completists, these 98 stories (including five published for the first time) will be like a boxed set of a musician's first recordings. AKATA WARRIOR, by Nnedi Okorafor. (Viking, $18.99.) The longawaited sequel to Okorafor's "Akata Witch" is about a 13-year-old Nigerian girl whose mystical powers could save the world. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 6, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

This book is big in size and significance, the first volume containing all the short stories written by the revered Vonnegut, mostly during the 1950s. The editors of this treasury explain that Vonnegut published a bit fewer than half of them, so there are tales here that will be new to Vonnegut fans, while all seem fresh. Vonnegut made a living early in his career publishing these tales in such mainstream magazines as Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post. Expert biographical and critical commentary is provided by Vonnegut's friends, scholar Klinkowitz and author Wakefield, who created a judicious thematic structure based on such categories as War, Women, Science, and Work Ethic versus Fame and Fortune. Meant to get readers thinking, these stories both preserve a lost world and showcase Vonnegut's phenomenal prescience. In his foreword, Dave Eggers pinpoints another key trait: Vonnegut wrote moral stories meant to tell us what's right and what's wrong, and . . . how to live. In our time of dangerous ambiguity, Vonnegut's clarity is restorative, his artistry and imagination affirming.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A sterling collection of the late Vonnegut's corpus of short fiction, with several unpublished pieces to balance better-known published and anthologized work.As volume editors Klinkowitz and Wakefield note, the 98 stories gathered here come mostly from magazine work of the 1940s and '50s, some later collected in books such as Welcome to the Monkey House, as well as unpublished pieces posthumously gathered by Vonnegut's executor and a few retrieved from Vonnegut's papers at Indiana University. The editors nicely complicate the collection by breaking it into eight thematic groupswar, science, and so forth. Vonnegut being Vonnegut, the stories do not always neatly fit into these categories: the deftly ironic "Just You and Me, Sammy" has elements of war story, spy story, and murder mystery all rolled up into one. Given Vonnegut's experiences in World War II, many of the stories are death-haunted; in one plainspoken tale, meaningfully called "Out, Brief Candle," he writes of a woman who "felt old because her husband, Ed, who really was old, had died and left her alone on the hog farm in northern Indiana," the Hoosier State being a favorite setting. Some of the stories seem written to dutiful formula, but even when he is writing more or less conventionally, Vonnegut sneaks in some pet themestime travel, say, with one wonderfully strange yarn featuring a character who says, "I want you to kill me and bring me back to life," a request that, naturally enough, has odd consequences. His trademark existential despair is here in spades, and even if nothing quite dazzles in the way of Cat's Cradle or Slaughterhouse-Five, nothing clinks, either. There's plenty of humor worthy of O. Henry, too, as when he writes of a high school band class, "C Band set out in its quest for beautyset out like a rusty switch engine, with valves stuck, pipes clogged, unions leaking, bearings dry."Essential for Vonnegut completists, of courseand budding writers can always learn a thing or two from the sardonic master. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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